Reagan Could Bridge the Republican Party’s Divides

Linda Chavez was the director of public liaison in the Reagan White House and the G.O.P. Senate nominee from Maryland in 1986. She is the chairwoman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative research group focused on race and ethnicity.

Updated July 23, 2012, 4:33 PM

Ronald Reagan had the uncanny ability to make compromise look like victory. Reagan didn’t always get all that he wanted — his landmark 1986 tax reform bill was preceded by extensive horse-trading between the White House and interest groups and members of Congress — but in the end, he accomplished more than any president in recent times.

The 40th president would remind modern Republicans that getting the big things right is more important than punishing every ideological deviation.

Part of his success was his personality. He never gave a sense that political disagreements were personal. He could maintain a friendly relationship with House Speaker Tip O’Neill even when the two were bitterly divided over budget cuts and priorities. His methods were built on persuasion, not attack, always more likely to use humor than name-calling against his opponents.

But the real key to Reagan’s success was to know what was possible to achieve at a given time. This didn’t mean he compromised his principles, but he knew that the public — or a divided Congress — was not always where he was on a given issue.

I saw this first-hand on the issue of affirmative action while serving in the White House. Reagan was a staunch believer that government had no business encouraging racial preferences in public education, government hiring or contracting — as confirmed by his appointments of anti-preference stalwarts, including me, to policy positions within his administration. But when some of us who urged him to rescind a long-standing executive order that required such preferences, he chose not to.

I don’t for a minute believe he changed his mind on the principle involved, but he knew that rescinding the executive order would be a pyrrhic victory, soon overturned by Democrats and moderate Republicans through legislation.

If President Reagan were leading the G.O.P. today, he’d have his hands full. But my guess is, he’d manage to lead in such a way that even the most uncompromising would learn that getting the big things right is more important than punishing every ideological deviation.